How Alan Tudyk Became Rogue One's K-2SO

The origin of the voice for K2 is a lot of

the Imperial characters have English accents.

But I did the audition initially

with a couple of other voices.

One was kind of like where it is speaking correctly,

every word is said as if you were a machine.

The captain says you are a friend,

I will not kill you.

I luckily had done a robot before,

so I had approached it that way,

what would it be like to speak?

Robots don't breathe, that's a huge

part of how we express ourselves.

So I had already organized a lot of things in my head,

then it's just about the character.

His back story, he was in the Empire, he was a bad guy.

He was reprogrammed so it was sort of

like he had a change of heart, you know?

A digital change of heart and that did affect him.

I thought of his as someone who's young

because once he's taken out of the Empire

and he no longer has that servitude,

he is free to be himself for the first time.

I always had to wear stilts when I was doing K2.

Took me a little bit to get used to walking around in 'em.

Certain sandy beaches weren't so great.

Once one foot went wrong, my leg would wobble

and then it just became like I had a flat tire,

but I think I got pretty good on 'em.

There were also these robotic hands

and they would slip all the way up to my shoulder

and then they went way past my hands,

and when I moved my hands the fingers moved

so I could grab things, I could pick things up,

I can punch buttons and stuff.

It was amazing.

We colored outside the lines, you know?

You would start out the day like,

Alright, here's this, what are we gonna do?

And then everybody would start throwing around ideas,

I think I should do this.

What if we do it this way?

What if we do it this way?

It was a collaboration and so that's how K2 came about.

I just worked with the other actors and the director

and made the best movie that we could

and had a blast doing it.

(instrumental action music)